Switzerland’s leading charitable umbrella foundation

Fondation des Fondateurs' mission statement

Fondation des Fondateurs is Switzerland's leading umbrella foundation, and is designed to promote charitable projects in Switzerland and abroad. It operates independently of financial service providers, and adopts a neutral political, ideological and religious stance.

History and establishment

Lori and Karl Lutz-Dinkel established Fondation des Fondateurs in 2007, seeking to pave the way for a broad variety of individual foundation concerns by pooling resources. This vision defines our purpose to this very day.

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Requests for funding

Since the Foundation for Founders is an umbrella foundation, it does not accept any requests for funding. The individual foundations incorporated within its organisation are exclusively responsible for funding.

What is an umbrella foundation?

An umbrella foundation provides dependent foundations and smaller endowments with the opportunity to pool administrative tasks, asset management, and certain aspects of project support. On the one hand there are umbrella foundations operated by banks, while on the other we find independent umbrella foundations managed by financial service providers. Umbrella foundations are ideally suited to accommodate 'sub-foundations' and legacies. They maintain a professional system of asset and donation management, and represent a particularly attractive alternative to an individual foundation, especially in the case of less substantial estates.

Your advantage with the FdF:

We enable founders to choose between two vehicles to execute their charitable foundation idea without any restriction whatsoever in terms of content or geographic location: a general foundation fund or a dedicated, restricted foundation fund.